National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Announces $18.6 Million in Funding for 199 Humanities Projects Nationwide

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $18.6 million in grants for 199 humanities projects across the country. These grants will provide digital access to the personal papers of Helen Keller and enable the creation of a new permanent exhibition at the Delta Blues Museum on the history and influence of this quintessential American musical genre.

[Clip]

These projects help preserve and tell the story of essential chapters of American history, such as the digitization of artifacts excavated at Plimoth Plantation documenting the daily lives of early English settlers and Native American inhabitants of the area, and work at the American Discography Project to make Thomas Edison phonograph recordings available online through the Library of Congress’s National Jukebox archive.

Other projects illuminate the unique history and culture of a particular state, city, or region. “New England’s Hidden Histories” will collect and publish 18,000 pages of records from the nation’s founding era from the archives of northeastern churches, while a grant to the New-York Historical Society will provide for the digitization of 66,000 photographs documenting the construction of the New York subway system. Other funding will support creation of a new permanent exhibition at the Idaho State Museum on the role of Native Americans in the history and culture of Idaho.

[Clip]

NEH Documenting Endangered Languages grants, administered in partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF), will provide for a digital repository of Coeur d’Alene, a nearly extinct Salish language spoken in northern Idaho, to facilitate language revitalization. And grants awarded through Humanities Open Book, a joint venture between NEH and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will give second life to important out-of-print humanities books on classics, medieval studies, American, European, and Asian history, and science education.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.